Today algorithms rule our lives, this needs to change!

Everybody who doesn’t watch Fox News (state TV) will know by now how much the Russians helped the Donald get elected President. The question I still have with this today is why him? They were helping him way early in the republican election process, why not one of the other republican candidates? Is it because they knew he could be manipulated? he has rich Russians staying in Trump tower New York & has for years. Why they decided to use social media to help Trump eludes me, yet they did!

FaceBook, Twitter, Google all use algorithms to determine what to show you when you log on or do a search. The search results are created to show you what the company thinks you want to see! that’s all well and good, but when you are looking for unbiased information this is not the way to go. You will be fed exactly what you need to keep thinking what you want to believe. The bubble that has politics so polarized can be said to have been create by a computer program. With ten likes on FaceBook the computer knows you as well as a member of your family. There are many articles TechCrunch and this one CNBC that have mentioned the devil that is FaceBook. I actually deleted my account because it freaked me out when you look for something on your phone on Amazon, then go to Facebook and guess what you will see come up on an add?Yup!

I know from reading Teri Kanefield that what is going on with Trump and the GOP is fear of change, the white ones are losing their dominance and they are fighting back. They feel that progress will leave them behind, and it is true. They want to take us back to a time that existed for only a rich few. It’s an idea that has no place in a modern society. But with the help of Fox News (state TV) the average person who alas chooses to watch (state TV) has been bombarded with propaganda that onlyPaul Joseph Goebbels would be proud of. It’s the difference between Fox News (State TV) & NPR (News).

But what has made this much harder to fix, because fixing it is going to be very hard. The computer companies have to figure out a way to not only give results in search but also give credence to the results. Or at least fake news should be labelled as such, with citations as to why. FaceBook needs to get out of news period! It was the reason the Russians were so easily able to manipulate the American public against Clinton. When the Autocrats are in charge we don’t have a democracy. Legislation is being done by people who were not voted in as such but have manipulated the system so much that we weren’t able to vote them out!

In the end this all comes down to trust, I trust the news media, NY Times NPR, BBC, because that’s their job. Fox News is not a news outlet (State TV). When I lived in England I knew the Sun was a conservative newspaper, the mirror was more liberal. So you could read both and get a gist of what they were saying. I preferred the times or the independent as I liked my news more neutral. NPR is the equivalent of the BBC, which means you get news. Bottom line is never trust just one news source, they can sometimes make mistakes. Because that’s life, it happens. But not everyday not every story, and most of the time it’s a fairly accurate account.

And so can computer algorithms, they can also make mistakes. they need to be tweaked every so often. As a web developer when google changes its algorithm which it did not too long ago. All the web developers were checking their websites ranking to see what changed. All the tech companies that we rely on for our information need to be more responsible of the outcomes of their business models. It’s not good enough any more to blame Russia because they could. We should be asking why did we let them?